Unlike Ed, my polystyrene alter ego, I found this TEDx thing pretty nerve-wracking. There’s a big digital clock at your feet that counts down your allotted time, and then starts flashing admonishment if you overrun. But though Ed may seem rather more chilled out than me, at least I’ve still got more hair than him.

Let me know what you think in the comments below…

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Tom Crompton at TEDxExeter appeared first on Common Cause.

This is the Mouse Paradigm, and it’s the subject of a recent study into how economic markets affect our moral values. The way we produce and trade goods, particularly in complex global markets, tends to produce what are rather clinically termed  ‘negative externalities’, or in plain English, social and environmental harm. This can mean the air and water pollution affecting villages near Chilean copper mines, or the street children in Kolkata whose livelihoods are directly affected by the price of gold on the international market. Often, these impacts are both difficult to grasp and easy to ignore. We all participate to some extent in these ‘externalities’ by our consumption of goods and services. But what role does the market itself play in our ability to turn a blind eye? And how do we react when these harms are directly and consciously connected with our own participation in the market?

The trade-off between money and the life of a mouse is one rather gruesome technique that can help us understand whether people make moral decisions differently in the marketplace. It’s a way to make a crude and explicit link between market interactions, and the costs that trade can impose on third parties that have no say in the bargaining process.

Money changes our priorities

We know from previous work that the very idea of money can set our moral compass spinning. Kathleen Vohs showed this pretty comprehensively with a series of experiments, published together in Science which tested how subtle, non-conscious reminders of money affect people’s behaviour. One of the experiments had a lab computer set up to show dollar notes on its screen-saver, another one was in a room with a poster of different currencies on the wall, another had the participants playing a short game of monopoly – and all these reminders of money were enough to make the participants become measurably (but temporarily) more self-centered. They were less willing to help people, and preferred to go solo rather than join in with social groups, but they were also prepared to take on more work, and try harder at challenging tasks.

As Vohs stresses, this doesn’t necessarily show that “money makes us selfish”. What it does show is that money can change our immediate value priorities. It makes us place less importance on kindness and cooperation, and more importance on personal achievement and performance.

Markets erode our moral values

What about the marketplace? How does money affect us when we are active players in a bargaining and trading system? This is where the Mouse Paradigm comes in. By measuring people’s willingness to allow severe, negative consequences for third parties (or slightly more than just ‘negative’, for the poor mice involved!), we can compare how we make moral decisions in different contexts. But first, just to establish a baseline, the researchers looked at how people reacted when they had to make the decision on their own: a simple trade-off between letting a mouse live, or receiving a payment of €10.

In this case, no markets in sight, 46% of people were prepared to take the money and allow the mouse to die. Already this result is pretty surprising. Everyone was fully informed about the direct consequence of their decision – they knew the mouse was healthy and, if saved, could live for another 2 years. They also knew how the mouse would die, because they watched a short video on the process. There are probably many reasons why people responded like this to mice, which would be worthy of a separate discussion. (Not to mention the ethics of allowing social psychologists to conduct these kinds of experiments in the first place).

The second group of participants were faced with the same decision, but this time as players in a simple ‘bilateral’ market – one seller and one buyer. Like everyone else, they were told that “the life of the mouse is entrusted to your care”, but they now had the choice to negotiate over the price of the mouse with another player, with a possible €20 to split between them. So if they settled on a price of €8, for example, then the seller would receive €8, the buyer would receive the remainder of the pot (€12), and the mouse would die. This gave both parties a financial incentive (of roughly €10 each) to try and strike a bargain in their favour. If they decided not to trade at all, then the mouse would live.

The result? Most sellers were willing to let the mouse die, and 72% were willing to accept €10 or less in exchange.

When the market became bigger and more complex, people valued the mouse life even less. In the third part of this study, people were players in a ‘multilateral market’ – with nine sellers (nine mice) and seven buyers. This time, 76% of sellers agreed to let the mouse die in exchange for €10 or less.

So we’re prepared to accept a much lower average price for a mouse life in market conditions, compared to when we’re on our own. What does this tell us about how market interaction impacts our morals? Why do we value an animal’s life differently when we make decisions as a market player? Here are some of the main suggestions from the literature:

1.   Market frames. We generally associate economic markets with values such as competition and wealth. As the authors of this study put it: “markets provide a strong framing and focus on materialistic aspects such as bargaining, negotiation, and competition, and may divert attention from possible adverse consequences and moral implications of trading.”

2.   Social norms. The way our markets are structured, and the social and environmental harm connected with our trade, sends us some indication of what’s considered normal and acceptable in society. We’re less likely to react according to our own moral criteria, when something is strongly endorsed by others around us.

3.   Diminished responsibility. The more players there are in the market, the less people feel personally responsible/guilty for the harms caused by trade.

That our moral reasoning is affected by interacting with markets should not imply a wholesale questioning of the role of markets in society. Economic systems have always been a fascinating and important element of our social structure, and they have reflected (and shaped) cultural values in myriad different ways. The Mouse Paradigm is one way to show that a market frame can bring certain values and expectations to the fore, which make us more likely to put economic valuation ahead of other important considerations. The studies we’ve just discussed are particularly interesting because they make the ‘externality’ absolutely explicit: everyone is fully aware that they will be directly responsible for the fate of the mouse. This suggests that the market context is itself formidable force, and there is only limited potential in appealing to the moral consequences of trading. We can highlight the social value of protecting the water supply near a Chilean copper mine, for example, but how much moral force will this hold if we have a stake in the copper market?

Clearly, this is an area of research that needs more work, and we can’t take this study as a blueprint for how markets affect our valuation of all social and environmental harms. Rather, we should take it as a recommendation to think harder about the impact of marketisation on our decision-making. How might markets impact the way we value each other and the environment?

As Michael Sandel says, “we have to ask where markets belong—and where they don’t. And we can’t answer this question without deliberating about the meaning and purpose of goods, and the values that should govern them”.

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how markets affect our morals appeared first on Common Cause.

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein

What we learn and how we are taught are key to shaping the people we become. The heated debates around the UK’s National Curriculum in recent months attest to a general recognition of this: with the fight-back against the proposal to remove climate change from the syllabus; discussion around what is taught in history classes; and a current trend for questioning how to teach ‘character’. What is not always considered is what values are being taught through our education system. New ‘action research’, carried out by Lifeworlds Learning in collaboration with Oxfam, Practical Action, the British Red Cross, Think Global and the National Children’s Bureau, aims to address this. Their recently launched report, Leading Through Values, outlines the findings of a pilot study in which primary school teachers took to teaching children about values in nine UK primary schools.

The idea of ‘teaching values’ will set off alarm bells in the minds of many (myself included!), but this project was intensely aware of this. Teachers were asked to reflect both on their own values and on the problem in trying to ‘impart values’. The project aimed to create understanding that society is already shaping our values on a daily basis, and we should at least be discussing this openly.

“The project highlights the influence different people and environments have on an individual’s values. The class became more tolerant of each other’s beliefs when we unpicked what values were and how we all differed from each other depending on individuals’ circumstances. Within a safe environment we were able to challenge behaviours.”
- Teacher

The intention, then, was to equip both teachers and pupils with the language of values and awareness of how to identify where and how values play out in the world we live in. Rather than creating another add-on of discrete activities, this was designed to fit in with the syllabus and existing teacher lesson plans. Children discussed values through the books they were reading, through games, through current affairs, and through local issues. Both teacher ownership and pupil voice were heavily encouraged. Afterward, teachers reported how taking part in the project had opened their eyes to the connections between issues and values, and recounted how the language of values had contributed to children’s understanding of the world around them.

“No, Henry VIII wouldn’t be a good leader today because he didn’t value mutual respect.”
- Yr 5 pupil

“… a statemented child, who rarely engages in an appropriate way, could say how during the Egyptian riots Mubarak was breaking human rights by not letting people choose their own president.”
- Teacher

Those interested in measurement will be glad to hear that the researchers also measured both teacher and pupil values before and after (and some significant shifts were found – values such as benevolence, universalism and achievement all showed increases); as well as carrying out a qualitative appraisal of learning outcomes and wellbeing.

Whilst the pilot phase is now complete, the project partners are seeking interest and support from groups and individuals to continue the work (including further involvement from schools in the future).

“It’s not a new way of teaching so much as a new idea of teaching. A new way of reflecting on how you teach and what’s going to have the best impact.”
-Teacher

If you’re interested in discussing this research or being involved, please contact the project co-ordinator Rob Bowden.

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A new animation exposes three lies we are told consistently by our government about our emissions, launched just before the UK’s Climate Change Committee released a long-awaited report in April.

We currently account only for territorial emissions – those created within our own borders. This conveniently allows us to ignore the emissions associated with everything we consume that we import from elsewhere in the world. Is this such a big deal? Well, yes. It means that, whilst on paper, the UK’s carbon emissions have fallen by 20% since 1990, when measured on a consumption basis they have risen by 10%. As shown through Freedom of Information requests two years ago, ministers and civil servants have known about this for many years but have chosen to simply ignore it.

But consumption drives growth, and growth keeps us afloat, and that’s the only way we can be happy, right? Well, no. Welcome to another lie. After a certain level, increases in income have no bearing on how happy we are. Focusing on consumption and growth is not only misleading, it’s actually damaging to us and the planet. Misleading because the error margins are often bigger than the miniscule increases or decreases fixated upon by rolling news; before even getting to the fact that GDP excludes most of what we hold dear: how happy we are, how much time we have to spend with our friends, how we treat one another. As Robert F. Kennedy once said, such reductionisms “measure neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country.”

Damaging, perhaps more worryingly, because a focus on money and consumerism can actually make us less happy, less concerned about the environment, and less compassionate, because of the encouragement of materialistic and self-interested values. Research shows that these values are in direct, psychological opposition to values centred on concern for community, other people and the environment. Encouraging consumerism – such as through commercial advertising – is not only harming the planet through its directly destructive use of resources, it is undermining society’s concern about this damage and ability to act collectively to work against such damage.

So what can we do about it? First, maintain the pressure on our government to take our outsourced emissions into account. And, second: start tackling consumption. We should think about redefining our relationship with material goods, and encouraging collaborative production as well as consumption. We should stop talking about GDP as if it matters more than how well we’re doing socially and environmentally. And we could think about addressing advertising – a key component of consumer culture –to allow our minds to be freer of clutter and anti-social values.

The animation was launched on April 16th at Friends House, Euston. The speakers were Guy Shrubsole (Friends of the Earth), Kate Soper (London Met Uni), John Barrett (Leeds Uni), Alice Bows (Tyndall Centre, Sustainable Consumption Institute), Tom Crompton (WWF-UK), Ruth Potts (New Materialism), Caroline Lucas (MP, Green Party).

Audio from the event, held at Friends House Euston, is available here.

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Well, no; not necessarily.

As part of a research project on promoting lower-carbon lifestyles, I interviewed people who have cut their carbon footprint because they’re worried about climate change, to try and understand more about what motivates them. Concern about ‘the environment’ for its own sake is not generally their main reason for action. They tend to be more bothered about the effects of climate change on poorer people in developing countries. They’re often motivated by a deep sense of the injustice of a situation where those who will suffer most are those who have contributed least to the problem, and they talked in terms of trying to live with a fairer – therefore smaller – share of the world’s resources. When I asked them to imagine that we live in a different kind of world, one in which climate change would threaten polar bears with extinction but would somehow have little effect on humans, several interviewees said they would probably not be so anxious about the issue, and would not be trying so hard to address it.

Moreover, their stories about how they’d got engaged in climate change action were about human rights groups and issues as often as environmental ones. Sally said that because she believed that all the gains she’d worked for in terms of women’s rights in developing countries were threatened, “it was probably actually feminism which brought me into climate change.” Deepta explained that many of her friends in her university Amnesty International group were also involved in environmental campaigns so she joined in with them too. David talked about growing up in South Africa, where “you really had to have a view about what you thought of race discrimination and so on.” This led to political and social awareness that developed into concerns about many issues, including climate change.

It seemed to me that these were people who cared about the environment but who cared even more about people and social justice. To check this, I asked interviewees to answer a short questionnaire testing the strength of ‘biospheric’ (environment-centred), ‘altruistic’ (people-centred), and ‘egoistic’ (self-centred) values as guiding principles for their lives. The top-rated value was ‘social justice’, with ‘equality’ second. ‘Protecting the environment’ came third, and ‘respecting the earth’ was only sixth (after being ‘helpful’ and ‘a world at peace’). The majority of interviewees scored higher on the altruistic values scale than the biospheric one. Not surprisingly, they scored egoistic values low.

I also asked interviewees “what images come to mind with the phrase ‘a low-carbon lifestyle’?” Although many gave a list of things to do (or to do without), some offered quite different ideas:

“For me it’s more local living, stronger communities, more time for each other [. . .] a less materialistic lifestyle where we don’t need to have so much and hopefully meaning that we don’t need to work so much and have more free time.” (Paul)

“Somehow I see sunshine. Yeah, lightness actually. Brightness and a sort of small place to live. Green grass and everything bright. There’s something healthy about that. Healthy and wholesome I suppose.” (Aileen)

“Living really close to nature. I think that is the most dominant one. That’s the one that makes me happy and that’s the one that makes me inspired […] I think communities is another one. Connections with nature and community living” (Deepta)

These aren’t images that would translate into ‘carbon reductions per year’. They show that lower-carbon lifestyles are associated, at least for some people, with a much broader vision of ‘the good life’, and benefits such as health, happiness, and community. This also seemed to be true for some of the people who answered with the more typical list. For example, Claire thought fewer cars on the streets would be “lovely” because people would interact and not have to worry about traffic. Prue repeatedly stressed the satisfaction she gains from cycling (“it’s not only that you are not using resources, but you see a neighbour and you stop and say hello in a way you don’t when you use the car”) and buying local produce (“you are eating healthily, and you’re saving money”).

To me, perhaps the most remarkable finding was that some of these highly motivated people weren’t even that keen to talk about climate change. They thought the phrase was off-putting, or they were irritated by it because it’s overused, or they were simply not that interested in climate change. One person said she didn’t think you even have to believe in climate change to want to live a lower-carbon lifestyle, because of the benefits you’d gain from it.

These findings have important implications.

For example, appealing to altruistic values and to desires for things like quieter streets and stronger local communities may be more effective ways of encouraging people to change their behaviour than focussing on information about climate change impacts on the natural world.

People who want to promote lower-carbon lifestyles might find it worth working with human rights and development groups, and with organisations that place emphasis on altruistic values, like many religious groups. Development charities such as Oxfam and Christian Aid are already campaigning on climate change, but more could be done to make links between the concerns of organisations promoting women’s, children’s, and refugees’ rights and welfare and the potential impacts of climate change on these groups.

The wide-ranging positive visions of what ‘a low-carbon lifestyle’ means to people, and the fact that ‘climate change’ is not necessarily seen as interesting suggests that action campaigns should promote a much broader, more holistic view of a lower-carbon future, not just a ‘to do’ list to ‘combat climate change’. People do need information and advice about what action they can take, but “Ten Tips to Save the Planet” type messages may not be the best way of framing it – or not for everyone.

Obviously, these interviewees are not typical of the general population, but if “It’s the environment, stupid!” is not a catchphrase that really captures the range of motivations of even these committed people, the approach it represents is probably even less likely to inspire widespread behaviour change among the general public. Climate change is a complex problem with social, economic, political and ecological dimensions. This research suggests that it shouldn’t be framed merely as an ‘environmental’ issue by those who hope to engage the public in dealing with it.

This blog is by guest author, Dr. Rachel Howell of Aberystwyth University. All names used in this post have been changed.

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The aim of the ALP is to catalyse action that contributes to sustainability by strengthening intrinsic values.  The ALP will consist of six workshops in Scotland – one per month from September 2013 to February 2014 – supported by a mentoring programme. It is open to groups and organisations promoting community engagement with the natural world.  Participants will be recruited in pairs from each group/organisation and nine groups/organisations will be able to participate.

We will be holding an information event on Tuesday 23rd April in Edinburgh, from 10:00 to 12:30. If your group or organisation is interested in participating in the ALP, you can book your place at the information event by visiting: http://groupspaces.com/CommonCauseScotland

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Since our publication of Think of Me as Evil? Opening the Ethical Debates in Advertising in 2011, further evidence has accumulated that repeatedly viewing advertisements serves to undermine care for other people and the natural world. And yet we continue to bombard our children, in their formative years, with them.

No proper response to today’s pressing social and environmental challenges can be foreseen unless we find ways to broaden and deepen our collective concern about these issues. And yet the available evidence suggests that advertising works in precisely the opposite direction.

It makes little difference whether you lie awake worrying about biodiversity loss or climate change, discrimination against disabled people or human rights abuses; you need to support this campaign.

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This is a serious issue that is often unconsidered by the left. But more over today those of us who have invested years to the cause of stopping climate change are at risk of demoralisation, depression, exhaustion, and alienation. For me this has been a confronting reality as I have struggled with depression for the better part of 2012 and have undertaken to see a psychologist. I suspect there are others out there in a similar state of mind.

There is an idea that well sums up the reality of our task as climate activists “combining pessimism of the intellect with optimism of the will”. Unfortunately getting the balance right is no easy task, nor will that balance be achieved accidentally.

My view is that scientists are now saying we have “blown the budget” and we are certain to overshoot the 2 deg “threshold”. David Spratt has been writing some good pieces about this lately and the fact that even if we could adhere to a budget it is increasingly necessary that emissions “fall off a cliff”. These two pieces are highly recommended – 1 and 2 [go straight to part 3].

Given that the climate movement has focussed on setting targets/deadlines/time-frames, seeing an ever shrinking time-frame for acting to avoid climate disruption is very depressing indeed. Moreover many of us look at the size of the task and further despair at how far we have to go to win the support necessary for change.

So we are faced with an unanswerable riddle. How to steer the boat away from the iceberg, when the captain and crew are convinced there is no iceberg, and the passengers are too busy enjoying themselves. How does a small group, aware of the problem, organise a mutiny in time?

So whilst pessimism of the intellect is growing sharper, how do we “right the balance” and grow optimism of the will?

It is my view that the only real time-frame of concern to us is the time-frame necessary to build a movement large enough to win the political power necessary to enact change. In my view it takes nothing less than ten years to build such a movement, after reaching the point of achieving a unified leadership. Sadly we are too disunited and have too many bases for disagreement that a united leadership is some way off. Panicking about impending doom doesn’t help us much with the organised patient work of building a movement.

So where do we begin?

It is the imperative of the climate movement leadership to rebuild optimism in the face of our challenge and there needs to be concrete demonstrable actions undertaken to illustrate to all the activists in the climate movement reasons to be optimistic.

The first demonstrable action should be a commitment to greater unity amongst the climate movement and the marking out of points of agreement.

My observation is that the climate movement is presently dominated by a number of different NGOs each trying to compete for funding, members, and political space, ultimately acting in their own self interest. This obviously has an impact on trying to develop unity.

The socialist movement has a good slogan “strike together, march separately”. Different groups and organisation have different strategies for social change and thus we can accept that we will “march separately”, but wherever there is a basis for unity on a specific issue we can “strike together”.

What I mean by this is that there are two levels of unity. Unity at a strategic level and unity at a tactical level. On both levels however it is essential that unity is marked out on clearly defined basis. We need genuine unity, not amorphous getting together and papering over the differences. In my opinion this is what is happening with the merger between a number of Socialist organisations in Australia. This merger, which began with discussions between the explicitly Marxist organisations, Socialist Alternative (SA) and the  Revolutionary Socialist Party, has drawn in other left wing groups including Socialist Alliance – a broad anti-capitalist party. When I quizzed Colleen Bolger, one of the leaders of Socialist Alternative, on what they where actually proposing as concrete points of unity, i.e. what they actually agreed upon, she said “well we both agree upon being revolutionary”. This kind of amorphous phraseology just won’t do, the specifics need to be traced out explicitly.

There is an elephant in the room here which is the fundamental disagreements between two different camps in the climate movement. Those that see incremental reforms as a precursor to achieving the political will for large scale change on climate policy, and those that see those incremental reforms as a diversion from winning broad political and grassroots support for political change that acts at the scale and timeframe that the climate science indicates is necessary.

My view is that it ought to be our focus to build a grassroots movement and that all those groups who fall into this camp need to get together to mark out points of strategic agreement in achieving unity at this level.

But this is not to reject the other side as being completely useless. Instead as I said we can “strike together, march separately”. Where there is a confluence of views on a particular issue why would we let our strategic differences get in the way of working together on an issue we do agree upon? This doesn’t stop us from voicing our opinions about the inadequacies of each others strategy. We can certainly voice criticisms and highlight the contradictions when they become apparent, but constant verbal assaults are not useful when they jeopardise working together at particular points in time.

There are plenty of examples that show how solidarity can work. Look at the Vietnam War. The main demand here was “Bring the Troops Home”. A number of groups could agree on that, even if they had substantial disagreements about the nature of the Vietnamese Communist Party, or the role of the United Nations. The same thing can be said of the “Equal Marriage Rights” campaign. A clear demand that unites people and groups, but sets aside the trickier differences around issues like the nature of marriage under Capitalism.

The problem is that unity is often couched in ideological terms based on agreement with scientific principles, e.g., what amount of atmospheric CO2e amount is considered a “safe climate”; or whether 2 degrees is an appropriate target to aim for. Unity needs to be based on actual strategic or tactical issues, some examples of these might be: do we need a revolution or not; is it more important to find the best messaging, or do we need to build networks on the ground; is door knocking a useful tactic or not; etc, etc.

I strongly believe the challenge of building unity is a problem of leadership. We need leadership that puts collective interest ahead of self-interest with a long term vision for growing a culture that fosters unity and challenges egotistical, selfish behaviour. The climate leadership needs to guard against individualising forces and the disruptive behaviour of self serving individuals wanting to get their way at the expense of the group.

Leadership is a space or forum for getting together and working out what to do next. It is not a hierarchical representative body that makes decisions in the interest of others. In that sense the ‘leaders’ in the climate movement need to consciously cultivate an non-exclusionary environment based on patience; respect; constructive healthy debate; democracy and teamwork. I intend to develop these ideas further in later pieces.

Now we have all had a large dose of fear and dread around the latest news on climate change I hope we can shift the debate to what needs to be done to build a successful movement. I think we need to put to the backs of our minds the approaching (or potentially lapsed) deadlines, and accept the reality that it is going to take a large amount of time and work in order to build the grassroots social movement capable of winning the political power necessary to stop climate change.

We need to build genuine unity and develop strong bonds/camaraderie between climate activists as an anti-dote to the grinding down we face under the weight of the challenge. Finally, continuing from his observation about love, Che went on to say:

“The revolutionary leaders must have a large dose of humanity, a large dose of a sense of justice and truth to avoid falling into dogmatic extremes, into cold scholasticism, into isolation from the masses. They must struggle every day so that their love of living humanity is transformed into concrete deeds, into acts that will serve as an example, as a mobilizing factor.”

This post is by guest author, Trent Hawkins, and was originally posted at Climate Code Red. Trent Hawkins has been active in the climate movement since 2006, initially in Perth where he helped to organise a number of public demonstrations and events including the 2007 Students of Sustainability Conference. After moving to Melbourne in 2008 he continued his involvement in the climate movement assisting the first human sign protests, participating in the Newcastle and Hazelwood Climate Camps, and the Canberra Climate Summits. Trent was until recently a member of the Socialist Alliance and ran for parliament in the 2007 and 2010 Federal Elections, and the 2010 Victorian State Election. Trent is a mechanical engineer with experience working in renewable energy and volunteered as a researcher for Beyond Zero Emissions on the Zero Carbon Australia Stationary Energy Plans. Trent has been spent much of the past two years working as the Project Director of the Zero Carbon Australia Buildings Plan.

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1. ^[1] Che Guevara, Man and Socialism, 1965 ↩

The post Rebuilding Optimism of Will appeared first on Common Cause.

Well, I’d put my money on it.

But, actually, when did that happen? When did we start to pepper our meetings, our work, and even dinner conversations with such words and phrases? Sometimes, our use of economic framing has an obvious trigger; take ‘credit crunch’. In one of the recent economic crises, journalists repeatedly used it (with a straight face), and then before you knew it, the 2008 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary carried a new definition of the word ‘crunch’, as meaning “a severe shortage of money or credit”. It was always pretty difficult to pass that particular term casually into everyday conversation, but now we officially associate crunch with economic recession, as well as biscuits.

Economic frames easily creep into everyday language via news media, or advertising, or political rhetoric, but we have little awareness of the effect that might have on the way that we think and behave. Psychological research is finally shedding light on this.

The ‘name of the game’

In 2004, researchers at Stanford University observed people playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma, a much-studied game of cooperation or betrayal where individuals can demonstrate altruistic, strategic or selfish motives. They created two versions of the game, totally identical except in name: half the participants played the ‘Wall Street Game’, and the other half the ‘Community Game’. The Wall Street players were consistently more likely to betray the other players and attempt to win the highest rewards through selfish means. But those who played the Community game, on the other hand, tended to cooperate with their counterparts.

The experiment ran with a group of American students and a group of Israeli Air Force trainees, and the findings were the same. To ensure that this pattern of play was unaffected by the personality traits of the participants, the researchers also asked participant’s friends and colleagues to rate how likely that person was to co-operate or betray during the game. In both experiments this rating had no ability to predict the outcome: it was simply the wording of the title that affected people’s playing style.

The obvious question to ask is how the title of the game affected play. There seem to be three possibilities: it may have shaped the participants’ personal motivations towards the game; their expectations of how others would play; or both. In the Wall Street game, for example, people may have assumed that other players would be ruthless and uncooperative, and so changed their tactics accordingly. The evidence suggests it is a mix. In both the Wall Street and the Community games, when people anticipated betrayal in others, they chose to respond with the same. But cooperation was different. When participants in the Community game expected cooperation, they generally opted to cooperate in return. In the Wall Street game, however, participants expecting cooperation chose to exploit it by betraying others.

On this evidence, it seems that words and phrases really can affect our immediate impressions, expectations and choices. Just using the term ‘Wall Street’, which many associate with the values of self-interest, competition and exploitation, is enough to cue aggressive and anti-social tactics during games.

What, then, if the frame in question is not an abstract phrase, but rather relates more directly to the way we think of ourselves?

Consumer versus Citizen

In 2012, a research group at Northwestern University in Chicago ran a series of similar experiments on economic framing, this time testing the effects of the word ‘consumer’.

In one experiment, they gave half the participants a computer task called the Consumer Reaction Study and the other half a task called the Citizen Reaction Study. The two tasks were in fact identical – the only difference was in the framing of the title. Yet they elicited strikingly different responses. The Consumer group was much quicker to associate positive emotions with materialistic values, such as wealth, image and success. This implies that they had a subconscious preference for materialism, triggered solely by automatic associations with the word ‘consumer’.

The next experiment extended this approach to see if other consumer-related words – such as ‘buy’, ‘status’, ‘asset’, or ‘expensive’ – would alter the way people rated their own competitiveness and desire to get involved in social activities. When they read these words, instead of more neutral words, participants tended to consider themselves more competitive and willing to out-do others. They were also less inclined to pursue ‘high-investment’ social activities (such as joining student groups, or signing up to volunteer for a good cause), but more inclined to favour ‘low-investment’ activities, such as having dinner or watching a film with friends. This striking reversal of social priorities suggests that materialism cues lead people to avoid intense, cooperative engagement with others and, as the authors put it, “instead opt for cheap-and-easy ways to satisfy their need to connect”.

In the final experiment, the researchers explored this link between materialism and anti-social behaviour by giving people a simulated resource-management assignment. As before, they sought to identify the impact of the single word ‘consumer’, but this time compared it with the word ‘individual’ rather than ‘citizen’. The participants were asked to read about an imaginary water shortage crisis, and act out the role of the person considered most to blame. They were then asked to rate how they felt about the situation, and how they would approach the solution. When the scenario referred to the participants using the frame ‘consumers’ instead of ‘individuals’, people felt less personally responsible for the problem, were less willing to trust the other players, and were less likely to consider cooperating to resolve the dilemma.

What does this really mean?

Both these studies suggest that allowing economic frames to become part of our everyday speech is likely to have negative side-effects. But how do single words have such an impact on us? The research suggests that it is because we unconsciously associate particular words and phrases with certain values, so words like ‘consumer’ or ‘Wall street’ are more likely to trigger values around wealth, achievement and social status, which in turn are likely to make us feel and act in certain ways. Economics and money are often associated with the self-interested ‘rational economic actor’: homo economicus. And when we are reminded of this identity, we have a greater tendency to act more like him/her, and express similar values.

These two studies have isolated some particular experimental conditions where this has a measurable impact on our behaviour. But we know from numerous other studies that these ‘self-enhancement’ values can affect our motivation for a whole host of behaviours beyond those tested in this research. In particular, they are associated with lower environmental concern and conservation behaviour; greater competitiveness and profit-seeking, and lower well-being.

Unfortunately, there is evidence that economic language is becoming a growing part of our everyday lexicon. We are being increasingly mistaken for homo economicus. The use of the term ‘consumer’ is especially notable: it outstripped ‘citizen’ during the 1970s, and is still on the rise.

Figure 1: Incidence of ‘consumer’ vs. ‘citizen’ in books archived by Google Ngram 1800-2000

Faced with this evidence, we can make a strong case for applying the precautionary principle. If single words can have a short term impact like this, then the wider effects of economic language in politics and media are likely to be greater. But we do help shape the rhetoric, so this is partly within our control. Popular movements have rendered words, phrases and even whole discourses unacceptable: consider racist and sexist epithets, or the recent furore over the word ‘pleb’. In the case of economics, we may already have a hidden advantage: economic frames often just feel wrong. Who likes being called ‘an asset’ by the ‘Human Resources’ Department, or a ‘customer’ of the Department for Work and Pensions? And does anyone really think of their gardens or local forests as ‘natural capital’?

By scrutinising and criticising news stories and political speeches, and deliberately using words with more positive associations, we can avoid unintentionally reinforcing unhelpful economic frames. It’s time, in other words, to stop putting our money where our mouth is.

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We are all painfully familiar with the plethora of statistics that illustrate how unsustainable modern lifestyles have become and how humanity is already consuming natural resources far faster than the planet can produce or renew them. In a bid to reverse these trends, increasing numbers of people are attempting to consume less, reduce waste and recycle more regularly.  The rapid growth of the sharing economy over recent years reflects this growing environmental awareness and commitment to changing unsustainable patterns of consumption. The possibilities for sharing are already endless in many parts of the world, in everything from cars and drills to skills and knowledge. The sharing economy is undeniably taking off - and rightly so.

But can sharing the things we own as individuals really address the environmental threats facing Planet Earth? To some extent the answer is likely to depend on which resources are being shared and how many people are sharing them. However, given the urgent sustainability challenges we face – from climate change to deforestation and resource depletion – it seems unlikely that even well-developed systems of collaborative consumption will, on their own, constitute a sufficient response.

Share, Unite, Cooperate from Share The World’s Resources on Vimeo.

While the sharing economy is an extremely exciting and important development in consumer behaviour, it has done little as yet to change the politics, structures and institutions that underpin and promote unsustainable lifestyles. Creating a truly sustainable world will ultimately require policymakers to enact much more radical reforms to the way we manage the world’s resources and organise economic systems. As many people involved in promoting the sharing economy recognise, it is becoming increasingly important to also support these wider goals for economic reform and world rehabilitation.

Transcending self-interest

The pivotal events of 2011 demonstrated that there are already many millions of people in diverse countries advocating for transformative systemic reforms, from the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring. These movements, alongside many other civil society groups and engaged citizens, recognise that it will be impossible to create a fairer and more sustainable future world unless we reform the policies that underpin and maintain the status quo. For those championing the sharing economy who hold a similar view, it is worth reflecting on some interesting research from the field of social psychology that could have a bearing on how the sharing economy should be promoted as an emerging trend.

Research eloquently expressed by Common Cause highlights the need for campaigners to promote those values that are more likely to create the end results they desire. In this light, there is currently some debate around how much emphasis should be placed on the financial benefits of sharing. There is little doubt that sharing does save money and the financial advantages can be an important factor in a person’s decision to share. But according to numerous studies, promoting ‘intrinsic’ values that go beyond concerns about oneself are, in the long run, far more likely to encourage sustainable lifestyles than a focus on ‘extrinsic’ values such as personal financial gain.

In other words, the evidence suggests that those who share because they are told it will save them money are less likely to engage in other environmentally beneficial activities, compared to those who are encouraged to share out of purely environmental or social concern. Moreover, by emphasising these intrinsic values in campaign messages, the evidence clearly demonstrates that similar values will naturally be stimulated. For example, encouraging awareness of broader environmental issues is more likely to stimulate concern for social justice, and vice versa.

The implications of such findings are clear: if those promoting the sharing economy agree on the need for a shift in public awareness that can effect real change in society, we need to emphasise the wider environmental and social benefits of sharing and not the purely personal benefits, such as financial savings. Stimulating values that go beyond self-interest in this way is far more likely to encourage social and environmental activism of the kind sorely needed today. Without much more effective public engagement in the politics that maintain unsustainable lifestyles, it will be impossible to address the long term solutions to inequality and climate change.

Putting intrinsic values first

The sharing economy is still very much in its infancy and, given the variety of stakeholders involved, its emergence as a force for good is being discussed from a wide variety of different perspectives. On the one hand, there are those who see the sharing economy as a tool for addressing pressing social justice or environmental issues – such as people establishing time banks, food sharing schemes or those pursing alternative, low carbon lifestyles. At the other end of the spectrum, there are many entrepreneurs who stand to make millions of dollars from their new sharing platforms, mainly by encouraging people to rent out the underutilised goods they own.

Could grouping these quite diverse activities together under the umbrella of the sharing economy be in any way problematic? One danger is that by attaching too much emphasis on self-interest and personal gain in relation to the concept of sharing, the altruistic aspects of sharing could be undermined and the more benevolent motivations of those who share could be increasingly ignored.

A recent article in Forbes Magazine perfectly illustrates how this is already happening in the mainstream media. The article focussed almost entirely on the significant financial potential of the sharing economy and barely mentioned the more ‘intrinsic’ values involved in its pursuit. The article serves as an important example of how those who reinforce extrinsic values in society (such as wealth generation) have the power to overwhelm the voices of those who pursue forms of sharing for more altruistic reasons, such as social justice or environmental protection.

Many proponents of the sharing economy would perhaps diplomatically argue that there is room for both perspectives and that most people are motivated by a combination of financial and social/environmental concerns. While this is certainly true in many cases, it is also worth bearing in mind that humanity currently faces what can only be described as a global emergency. There can be nothing more urgent today than reducing inequality or preventing runaway climate change, and the real solutions to these problems have little to do with wealth generation.

At this crucial juncture in the evolution of the sharing economy, it behoves us to think very carefully about how and why we pursue and promote sharing in society – both in our campaigning activities and in our engagement with the mainstream media. Given the urgency of the many crises we face, it is essential that social and environmental concerns remain at the forefront of the public discourse about sharing and the sharing economy.

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